


endless apologies of paradise

by sinistra_blache



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Arthur sees Mal after the jump, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Pre-Inception, Vertigo - Freeform, he copes with it but not necessarily well, implied unrequited relationships, inappropriate use of threatening chrysanthemums, triggered by flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27526423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinistra_blache/pseuds/sinistra_blache
Summary: “Vertigo,” Arthur tells him and, because he can right now, he leans into Eames’ side. He’s warm. He’s always warmer than Arthur. “It’s always vertigo. Falling, all the time, even when I’m lying down.” He closes his eyes just in case the world tries to throw him off again.“When did it start?”“Paris.”
Relationships: Arthur/Eames (Inception), Dom Cobb/Mal Cobb
Comments: 11
Kudos: 87





	1. Chapter 1

Arthur was awake when he got the call, but barely. He was awake, but laying in bed, and he was thinking. He can’t remember what he was thinking about because when he got the call, everything disappeared.

It was Dom, screaming and sobbing down the line, not making a damn lick of sense. Arthur tried, and failed, to get real words out of him. _I hear sirens,_ he said evenly. Dom made a choked noise of affirmation. _Put on someone in charge_.

He’d talked to the gendarme very briefly, but long enough to know that he had to be there. He had to find a way to Dom. He had to—

Three gendarmes were holding Dom back from the alley by the hotel. When Arthur arrived they looked relieved that there was someone around to talk to the crazed American, someone who had a decent grasp on French.

They’d told him that Dom couldn’t go around there. They tried to tell him that he couldn’t go around there. It wasn’t okay to see. Nothing was okay, here. They were still getting a picture.

Arthur was in the process of convincing a few officers that he should be allowed onto the scene, and he was about three seconds from pulling some agency credentials to give weight to his request, when a few more gendarmes came out of the hotel. They whispered to each other first, then two of them cuffed Dom.

“Hey,” Arthur said, like it would do anything. Like it would stop any of it. He was just held back by a single hand on his arm. A uniformed shake of the head. In moments, Dom was taken away. In moments, Arthur was granted access to the scene.

Everyone he’s ever known has told him that he looks like a fed. Maybe that helped him. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe the gendarmes just wanted to fuck with him. He’d never know.

#

Arthur had seen massacres before. In dreams, he had pulled out throats with his bare hands. He’d shot people at point blank range. He had seen the aftermath of IEDs, of smaller explosives, of everything in between. He knew what the human body looked like when it had been shredded, when there was no life left in it, when a person stopped being a person and became meat.

When he was told that Mal fell, that she had died from impact, he had expected to see meat. That’s not what he saw.

Her limbs were broken and angled wrong, of course, yes. She was pale, too pale. There was blood; her head hit the ground, her skull was cracked, but it looked like she was resting in a pool of dark water. The lights of the street nearby shone in the perfect mirror of her blood, but the crack wasn’t visible. Her eyes were open. One of them, the one closest to the ground, bloodshot and ruined.

She didn’t look _dead_. It was the only thing Arthur could think as he looked down at her. She didn’t look dead. She looked injured. She looked like she could blink at any second and get up, brush herself off, ask for a hand up to her feet.

Arthur nodded at her compulsively, trying to remember the words she said to him before all this, and pretended he was fine. He walked away from Mal and worked hard to forget what she looked like; resting on a mirror in the streets of Paris, waiting for someone to help her up. 

#

It took hours before they let Arthur talk to Dom. By then, he’d quietened down. Arthur leaned against the bars of the holdup, looking in at him.

Dom was the kind of guy that, even with his soft voice and serious expression, seemed to enjoy life. He jumped from job to job, project to project, story to story, with an excitement and energy that Arthur understood but could never replicate. Dom’s energy was the thing that pulled in clients, it was the thing that always convinced Arthur to join a team or to fix one of Dom’s problems. It was what paid their bills and saved their lives.

It was what nearly got them killed so, so many times.

The man sitting in lockup in Paris looked like Dominick Cobb but he didn’t have that same energy, that strange and irrepressible excitement. Dom looked pale in the fluorescent lights. His usual energy, the kind that made him need to move and fidget ceaselessly, was gone. Dom sat, quiet and motionless, on the bench. No more color left in him.

Arthur said nothing, found and pulled a metal fold-out chair as close to Dom as he was allowed. At the other side of the room, a gendarme stood and pretended not to listen. He kept glancing over when he thought Arthur wasn’t looking, giving away just how nosy he was, but it didn’t matter. Arthur didn’t care about him. He barely cared about Dom, truth be told, but he had to. He owed it to Mal to give a shit.

“They’re saying I killed her,” Dom said.

His voice was hushed and scratchy as if he’d been screaming. Maybe he had been. Arthur wouldn’t have blamed him; he sat down on the metal chair, the chill of it meeting the cold in his bones, and felt like he was screaming as well. He didn’t show a damned thing on his face, and Arthur wasn’t sure if he could unless he tried, but he knew that he was screaming himself raw on the inside.

“Did you?” he asked, because he had to.

Dom looked up — his hurt, the betrayal of Arthur’s question, so obvious in his eyes — and Arthur looked back. He didn’t regret asking. Who knew what Dom was capable of? What any of them were capable of? It wasn’t just Dom who was known to burn bright. Mal shone brighter than anyone else. Searing, sometimes, in the dark. Both of them were insane, and well Arthur knew.

You had to be crazy to be in this business. Arthur was hardly the picture of sanity. People thought of him as the sane one, but that was just because he cleaned up well. It was only because he knew where all his bullets went. It was the illusion of sanity.

And he knew himself. He knew that he was one bad day away from snapping. So was Dom. So was Mal.

“No,” Dom answered. “I didn’t kill her. Mal—"

He cut himself off. Raked his hands through his hair. Pulled at himself, his skin, his hair, his lips, his own neck. Like he wanted out. Arthur finally started to feel bad for him.

“Mal jumped,” he finished. Choked.

Arthur nodded again, couldn’t stop himself. Just sat there, looking at Dom trying to claw his own skin off, nodding at nothing. Mal had definitely snapped and, in doing so, managed to take Dom and Arthur down with her. Bloodless and clean. Distantly, Arthur wondered if she’d planned it that way but, nearly at the same time, he regretted the very thought. Mal never would.

She was devious when she wanted to be but she was never cruel. He’d never known her to be cruel.

#

Dom was held in Paris for two days before Arthur managed to get him out. A few phone calls, the odd fabricated document, a false ID claiming Arthur as the federal agent that the authorities there already assumed he was, and Cobb was a free man.

Kind of a free man.

While securing Dom’s path out of the French system, and while he was busy getting Dom back to the States, Arthur found out a few things. He found out that Mal had definitely jumped, and that Dom was an innocent man, for a start. That revelation came with a single unscrambled CCTV log, overlooked by the hotel’s staff. Sloppy, Arthur’s inner critic commented, but human error was always sloppy. Avoiding human error required the impulse to triple check plans, to follow up even trusted sources.

So, Mal had paid off the staff to hide her jump, and the gendarmes either missed or ignored this tape. It was a gross angle, and barely useful as genuine evidence. Arthur wouldn’t have blamed them for not bothering with it. For him, though, it was glaringly obvious what had happened. The grainy footage of Mal existing in one frame then disappearing in the next joined the memory of her resting on the pavement outside the hotel, appearing occasionally when he closed his eyes too tightly.

He decided that it would be best not to let Dom see this.

As the days went on, Arthur couldn’t stop himself from digging. He found psych evals stating that Mal was sound of mind. He found Mal’s will, filled to the brim with conditions in order to keep Dom from their children, and stared at all the pointed suicide clauses hidden within her life insurance policy.

They were on the flight back to San Francisco when Dom started to talk softly about dream theory. Limbo was a ghost story, Arthur had thought. Something COs told their basics to keep them from being stupid, from scrambling their brains. It was something that Miles had come up with to explain a concept, maybe, and not a real thing. It was not a real place.

Arthur had been wrong.

At first, he didn’t believe Dom. It was only when Dom kept talking, kept explaining, kept painting his sad picture that Arthur realized just how obvious it all was. Dom and Mal had loved to push the boundaries of dream-share. It was their whole thing. It was, Arthur suspected, what their whole marriage had been built on. When they first met, among other things, the Cobbs would insist on sleeping for longer than anyone else dared to. They’d go down for hours. Arthur never went with them on those long ones. He never wanted to.

The idea of them getting caught in Limbo was so perfectly them, that by the time Dom stopped talking it was obvious that Arthur had heard the truth.


	2. Chapter 2

Years pass. Not many of them, but time still marches on. Arthur attempts therapy, once. It doesn’t go well for the therapist and Arthur even considers feeling bad about it, and that’s the end of that experiment. 

He’s lost people before, anyway. He’s seen their bodies afterwards. Not just fellow soldiers, either, but friends — or, as close as Arthur had ever got to friends in the past. He moved on from them. He’s seen more death than he thinks most have within their community. His career’s history, his natural tendency to experiment with the boundaries of dream-share, his own proclivities; all had added to a mental body count, if not a real one. 

But Mal wasn’t just anyone.

#

The panic attacks started only a few days after Mal died, but they stick around for the years that follow. Arthur becomes used to them. Within the dream-share community, panic attacks aren’t unheard of. The brain chemistry of lucid dreamers is unique, and changes with nearly every job, so PTSD looks different on them. They wear it in new ways, baffling the psychiatric community at every turn. 

Arthur gets a kick out of reading the research papers on his downtime. He even thinks about submitting himself for study once or twice.

He manages. They all do. Seasoned dreamers don’t even bother to bring up the attacks. It’s part of the job, part of the scenery. Everyone's attacks look different, too; Arthur once met an architect who only spiraled when he was asked to work with water. It ate at Arthur, not knowing the details, so he asked. He didn't get much of an answer. The architect had said, _I only ever had one dream about drowning, and I was four. I’ve never even seen the ocean._ Arthur thinks about that architect sometimes, even though he can’t remember the man’s face or voice, when he’s looking down the barrel of his own spiral. 

After Mal died, as he circles his own spiral, Arthur wakes from dreamless sleep feeling like he’s falling. Getting to the bathroom to splash water on his face, to snap himself out of it, takes forever. Vertigo, he soon self-diagnoses. To combat it he lies down on the floor of whatever hotel he’s living in when it hits. He rides it out as the world spins and tilts around him, threatening to throw him off. There’s never anything for him to hold onto. Sometimes, and less rarely than he’d like to admit, Arthur vomits just from the sensation of plummeting. He could get into a T-37 at any point and let it nose-dive and Arthur wouldn’t feel a damn thing, but he still loses it when his mind starts to follow its own panic logic. 

There’s never any reason to fight it. It’s usually worse when he does. 

Arthur learns to manage with them, just like everyone else, and he gets used to his attacks. 

His only problem is not knowing any of his own triggers. 

#

They’re working together again, and it’s at the point in the job where Eames just seems to be living in Arthur’s hotel room. It always happens eventually, when they work together. Once — though Arthur keeps the incident tucked close to his chest and barely lets himself think about it unless it becomes tarnished, somehow — Eames even stayed with him when they weren’t working. 

They don’t talk about it, which is probably for the best. Eames adores ambiguity, and Arthur despises a mess. Messes are complicated.

Eames interrupts him while he drafts out a text. “You look entirely too serious, darling. What are you up to over there? Something I should be concerned with?”

“I’m always serious,” Arthur deflects. Eames doesn’t let him get away with it. 

“Yes, but you’re wearing your Very Serious face, not just your Mildly Serious face, which tends to mean that there are storm clouds on the horizon for some poor soul,” Eames intones as though there is a tune under his words that Arthur can’t hear. Lilting, Arthur thinks to call it but only to himself. “It’s in my best interests to make sure that said poor soul is not me.” 

He comes over to where Arthur is sitting and gently pulls the phone out of his hand. He places it delicately on the table beside them and, Arthur notes with some fondness, doesn’t try to steal a look at the message open on the screen. “You seem entirely too vexed for me to ignore, Arthur. Tell me what’s going on.” 

Taking a breath, Arthur reaches to pick up his phone again — but he makes sure his face is a little more neutral this time. He hadn’t meant to look so serious that Eames got worried. “Nothing’s going on,” he insists, but the look on Eames’ face is patient enough that he has to give up early in order to save face later. “Fine; it’s Cobb’s anniversary.” 

“Is that all?” Eames sits back on his heels, disappointed with the reveal. “Arthur, I know that you are unreasonably loyal to that prick, but he really shouldn’t take up so much rental space in your head. You had me worried. I thought something awful had happened, or that I had done something awful — which would result in _you_ doing something awful to _me_.” 

“Your priorities are firmly in place, as always,” Arthur deadpans, but Eames smiles at him all the same. He deserves an explanation. At least a small one. He really doesn’t have to bother with Arthur’s moods just to get a quick fuck, and yet he still does. Arthur owes him. “Cobb’s wedding anniversary is Mal’s anniversary.” 

Eames’ realization comes on slow, but it’s obvious when it lands. “Oh, Arthur. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“I got flowers,” he interrupts, gesturing to the chrysanthemums on the table, a bouquet of white and gray. Muted. Mal didn’t like her flowers too flashy. His chest tightens at the sight of them, Mal’s bloom, but it’s fine. He’s fine. “And I usually call or text Dom so that he’s not just sitting in it, you know. Like he usually does.” 

Eames looks at the flowers instead of Arthur’s face, which he’s sure is a mess of emotions usually unseen. Arthur tries to get himself under control while Eames looks away. “I had wondered about them,” he murmurs, so softly that Arthur suspects that he’s not actually speaking to him at all, now. Eames talks to himself all the time. It’s just a happy accident when conversations overlap with other people in the room. 

“Now you know,” Arthur states. The effort of pulling himself together makes his voice dull and weirdly distant. He sounds wrong to his own ears. Eames glances at him, but otherwise shows no concern. Arthur exhales: got away with it. “Give me a second to finish the text to Dom, then we can safely change the subject.” 

Eames’ gaze lingers on the flowers for a second longer before he turns to Arthur, smiling now. “I have a few new topics in mind.” 

“I’m sure you do, Mr Eames.” 

#

It’s a quick job. A password take from a mid-level exec in some fabulously powerful company in Singapore. One of those companies no-one’s ever heard of until it comes to light that they own half the world. Arthur’s used to those by now, and he’s learned that it is pointless to try to keep up with them all. Once you get high enough to the top they’re all the same. 

It doesn’t matter how simple or routine the job is. It doesn’t matter how professional the team he’s on is — though he has regularly noted, pleased, that this group is more settled than the usual bunch for quick jobs. Maybe it’s because Eames is there; though he still insists on tripping Arthur’s calm whenever possible, he brings an extra layer of professionalism. Maybe not in personality, that much is true and will likely always be true of Eames, but certainly in practice. Whatever the reason, Arthur feels level even with the date of the take looming. 

Some of the rest of the team, no matter how professional they might be, don’t act all that level. Their chemist tries to swallow a barrel twice. Arthur talks the guy out of it, explains how it all feels to everyone on those days leading up to the job, and tells him that he'll book the poor guy into a retreat. Arthur promises him a week of absolute calm and relaxation — after the job is done. Eames laughs afterward, saying that it wasn’t the spa week that Arthur promised that calmed the fucker down but the implicit threat that if the chemist didn’t get his shit together then Arthur would be the one pulling the trigger. 

Whatever the reason, Arthur's actions got the job done and the chemist calmed down. 

He catches their architect muttering to herself just before lights out. Frayed. A spiral, he recognizes from a distance. Silently, he leaves a sheet of antihistamines on the table in front of her. If she asks, he’ll say that he noticed her allergies acting up. He would give her a way out of the embarrassment. They’d still knock her out for long enough, and gently enough, that she would be able to sleep without sinking into whatever her spiral looks like. 

He’s smugly proud of Eames and himself. Veterans, managing their shit so well that neither of them start fraying. Maybe it’s the arrogance, and maybe it’s the fact that he had left the chrysanthemums to dry and wilt in the vase until their petal-fingers fell in clumps to the floor, but the night before the take is when Arthur loses himself. 

#

Cliched as it is, it happens too fast for Arthur to catch himself. 

Eames’ hands are full of the dinner they’d decided to pick up on the way back to the hotel. ”I’m starting to get sick of the room service,” he’d said, already leading Arthur to a noodle place that he’d found. Arthur could count on Eames for three things in life; firstly, he knew that Eames would never knowingly give Arthur up. They were never going to have a conversation about the nature of their relationship, and Arthur had made peace with that, but they’d had the talk about ransoms. It had gone well. 

Secondly, Arthur knows he can always count on Eames to stick with a job until the very last minute. He hates doomed missions, but he needs to be sure that he exhausts every option available to him. They’re alike, in that way. It might be their only similarity. 

Lastly, Arthur’s confident that no matter where they end up working, no matter what corner of the earth they find themselves on, Eames will sniff out the best locally-owned restaurant. He prides himself on finding these spots. Arthur never knows where he finds the time, honestly, but it’s one habit he doesn’t want to discourage so he doesn’t complain. 

Before it happens, just as he’s opening the door for Eames to head into the room and lay out their dinner, Arthur reminds himself that he needs to clean up the dying flowers. He tells himself that he’s left it too long. He always does this, pushing and pushing himself until he’s too uncomfortable to take it any longer. The fact is that cleaning up the flowers before they’re gone feels like a betrayal, somehow, and then cleaning them after they’re long gone seems so final. It’s a cycle. Arthur knows that technically, his behavior falls under the Executive Dysfunction heading, but knowing that doesn’t make it go away. 

Eames doesn’t mean to knock the vase over, but he does. He only means to turn, his arms full of noodles and far too expressive, about to say something no doubt mocking yet still warm, as is his way, to Arthur. It’s not his fault that as soon as the blue-plastic vase bounces off the hotel floor and leaves the flowers broken and scattered on the floor, Arthur’s world falls too. 

He hears Eames shout for him, but the sound is sideways too, somehow. At least the carpet is soft, and Eames manages to drop the food and move quickly enough to catch Arthur’s head before it bounces like the vase had done. “Bloody hell, Arthur,” he whispers harshly, surprised, and tries to sit Arthur up again. 

Arthur fights, but in the only way he can right now. His limbs feel like cold needles and his eyes hurt, straining to see, and stop seeing, and keep blinking away the sight of the chrysanthemums on the carpet beside him. He goes limp in Eames arms. He has to. He knows that sitting up will just be worse, in the end. He’s not just sitting at the lip of his spiral downward, like everyone else on the team had been. Arthur’s swirling in his own abyss. The only way out is through. 

Eames gets with the program quickly. “Alright,” he murmurs, and lets Arthur lay on the floor without his hands propping him up. For a long time, the only sound in the room is the quiet drip of the spilled broth and Arthur’s labored breathing. He tries to speak twice, but his words come out like slabs and Eames stops him. A hand on Arthur’s arm, that’s all, and he stops him. If it weren’t for Eames’ hand, Arthur thinks he would freeze. He shivers through the sweat under his suit and, when he’s finally able to keep his eyes shut, tries to block out the acute shame that begins to set in. 

No-one should have to see him like this. If it was someone Arthur didn’t give a shit about then that would be one thing. He’d forget about them, and not care about their opinion anyway, but this is the first time he’s gone down in front of Eames. Unraveled and nothing like the man Eames comes to when he needs to kill time while he works. Complicated. Arthur’s always suspected that all of this works for Eames because Arthur has made sure that it stays uncomplicated. 

“Is it the hotel?” Eames guesses. He’s worked out what’s going on. It’s not rare, it’s just usually unseen. He probably has his own bad days, though Arthur can’t picture it. Eames seems too carefree and at ease with himself to let this kind of thing grip him. His only stress comes from other people. Arthur knows that because he's, more often than not, the other person stressing Eames out. He hums when Arthur gets it together enough to shake his head. “So, not the hotel. Probably not the food. And it couldn’t be me setting it all off because I know you would have told me by now.” 

Any other time, Arthur might have smiled at that. 

“Am I right in guessing that it’s the flowers?” he asks quietly, knowing that he’s correct this time. Arthur nods. He’s not crying, not exactly, but a tear still wets his face. A stress response. “D’you want me to clean them up for you, darling? Would that help at all?”

Like it’s that simple, Eames just asks. Clean them up. Pick them up like they aren’t knives strewn across the floor, every one of them another blink, another time that Arthur has to see Mal resting on the ground in the middle of Paris, feeling for all the world like she’s just about to get up again. Clean them up. Arthur dreads the concept. The world tips again, like he’s about to slide off the surface, but Eames puts his hand back on Arthur’s arm. 

He opens his eyes and catches Eames nodding to himself. “I’ll clean them up,” he says, to no-one. To Arthur. To himself. Doesn’t matter. He says it, and then he does it. 

The angle is awkward. Every time Arthur tries to move to get a better look, tries to see what Eames is doing, his head swims and his vision tunnels. It’s bad enough, he tells himself, that Eames has to deal with him when he’s like this. It’s bad enough without pushing his luck so hard that he gets sick. He stays at his awkward angle, avoiding looking like even more of a fool, as Eames picks up every stem and dried out petal. 

They look like teeth. They reach for him like hands. The cold comes back when Eames moves away from him but Arthur is too exhausted to shiver. He thinks he sleeps. He must have done, he reasons, because the next thing he sees is a clean floor and the impossible sight of Eames with a dustpan and brush in his hand. He must have slept, just for a little, because he feels well enough to talk. 

“Eames,” he croaks, and the shame comes flooding back into his veins. The opposite of morphine. Unwelcoming and cold, but so familiar. It exhausts him more than the vertigo. “Eames.” 

He sees the thought of throwing the dustpan away from him cross Eames’ face. He doesn’t, thankfully, and instead places it carefully, silently, on the couch nearby before returning to where Arthur is still prone on the floor. “Hullo, Arthur,” he says. Voice low. Quiet. Familiar, too, but much more welcome than the cloying, cold-sweat of self-disgust. “Are you well enough to sit up?”

“One way to find out,” Arthur responds. His arms are heavy, still full of needles and ice, and it’s hard to push himself up. It always is. 

Eames huffs quietly. It might be a laugh. “Stop going on like I’m not going to help you,” he says, and manages to prop Arthur up enough with his shoulder that he can slide them both into a relatively normal seated position. It feels stupid, but Arthur knows that he wouldn’t have recovered as quickly as this without Eames around. Maybe Eames knows that. Maybe that’s why he laughed. Arthur’s mind feels too sluggish to keep up with the whys; he’s just grateful, right now, to be sitting. 

“You know,” Eames says conversationally, helping Arthur to lean against the foot of the bed in the middle of the room. It’s almost as if he’s sitting like an unassisted human being, like this. “Most people in our profession just have normal panic attacks, Arthur. I know that you’re still recovering and I will, of course, do everything in my power to make you comfortable right now but — do you mind telling me what the fuck that was?” 

Arthur turns his head very slowly to look at him. The world wobbles, but doesn’t tilt. It doesn’t spin. Improvements. He doesn’t answer Eames straight away, so obviously the silence needs to be filled. 

“Because, quite frankly, I don’t mind telling you that this episode was a bit bloody scary, actually,” he says. Arthur watches his jaw work with some fascination. “Didn’t look like a seizure. I’ve seen a fair share of those, so I was reasonably sure that you weren’t seizing. And it didn’t look like an aneurysm — eventually, anyway, it didn’t look like an aneurysm.” He fidgets, rubbing his fingers together. The phantom poker chips. 

He’s worried, Arthur realizes. “Not an aneurysm,” he confirms for Eames, who laughs, high and this side of hysterical. 

“Yes, thank you for that wonderfully clarifying statement, Arthur.” 

“Not a stroke,” Arthur continues, checking down the list. “Didn’t seize. Didn’t faint. Not poisoned.” 

“I know you weren’t fucking poisoned,” Eames sighs, shooting him a dirty and stressed look. Arthur is tired, and he feels like his skin is thinly stretched over him like paper, but he still ends up smiling at Eames’ expression. He’s too worked up. 

“Vertigo,” Arthur tells him and, because he can right now, he leans into Eames’ side. He’s warm. He’s always warmer than Arthur. “It’s always vertigo. Falling, all the time, even when I’m lying down.” He closes his eyes in case the world tries to throw him off again. 

“When did it start?”

“Paris.” 

Eames is quiet for a moment. They’d worked together in Paris, both before and after Mal’s death, but he has to know what Arthur means. He has to know why Paris, and when in Paris. “How did Mallorie Cobb die?” he asks. The question catches Arthur off-guard. It’s such a fact of the world, to Arthur, that Mal jumped and that he saw her on the ground afterward, that it’s hard to grasp, in that moment, the concept that Eames _might not know_. 

“Jumped from a window,” Arthur tells him, his head shaking like he can just say no to the memories, but the movement drags him down. On the lip of another spiral, Arthur gasps and pushes away from Eames so that he can lay flat again until it passes — but Eames catches him. Eames holds onto him. 

And he’s always so, so much warmer than Arthur. 

“You’re alright, darling,” he murmurs. He’s slung an arm around Arthur’s shoulders, pulling him in close as they sit on the carpet, on the floor, in the middle of a hotel, the day before a take. He keeps repeating it. _You’re alright,_ like he can will it to be true. Arthur keeps his eyes closed — he doesn’t want to tempt fate again by opening them — but he doesn’t push Eames away. He doesn’t want to. 

“You don’t have to jump, too,” Eames tells him. 

#

The job goes off without a hitch. It’s a simple one, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t, but it’s always a little bit of a rush to make it out the other side. That’s probably why dreamers get such a low before a job, no matter the size — all the attacks and episodes and spirals, they’re all just symptoms of a craving. They might be wrapped up in PTSD, that much is obvious, but it always comes back down to the addiction of dream-share. 

Some people think it’s possible every single dreamer is hooked to somnacin. And, while Arthur has never seen anyone strung out for any mix of the compound, he _has_ seen a hell of a lot of people lose themselves to the drop down. 

He knows that, in the end, that’s why Mal jumped. It was the drop that killed her, not the fall.

It’s all planned for them to break, as usual, after the job. Arthur’s finalizing their chemist’s spa booking on his way to the gate when Eames catches up to him. Dangerous. Fucking reckless. 

“Can I help you?” Arthur asks, trying to maintain some distance, but of course Eames breaks that almost instantly. 

“You’re alright, aren’t you?” Eames asks. 

They look at each other. Arthur isn’t refusing to answer, exactly. It’s just that the answer is complicated. He doesn’t want it to be complicated. So they look at each other. 

Eventually, Eames nods. “You’re alright,” he decides, and he even sounds like he believes it. Arthur wonders what he saw on his face. “Let’s do it again sometime, yes? You know where to find me.” 

He does. Arthur nods after Eames as he waves, heading in the opposite direction from Arthur’s gate. Another addiction that might kill him if he lets it, he knows. What he can’t figure out is which will be worse for him in the end.

He passes a duty-free display full of fake flowers on the way to the gate. Artificial chrysanthemum petals beckon to him through the glass but Arthur barely acknowledges the sight of them before he gets back to the booking on his phone.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not going to lie, I just wanted to mess Arthur up.


End file.
